Exciting Enhancements Coming Soon to Study Island

Students in grades 6 through 8, as well as elementary students in grades 3, 4 and 5, are using the online, interactive Study Island program, which is designed to meet MCAS and Common Core standards for Math and English.

Students currently have home and school access to the password protected program that allows students to practice skills and allows teachers to track individual progress and customize materials for students. The program includes a text-to-speech reader and other tools to individualize the student's learning environment.

For the first time this year, Peabody students have access to a Study Island writing assignment portal where student work can be saved and eventually submitted to the teacher.

Last school year, Summer Reading and Summer Math assessments for students at Higgins were developed using Study Island custom curriculum design features; the advantage to students was that they could take the assessment online as soon as their reading was finished instead of waiting until the second or third week of school to take a test on what they read over the summer.

In addition to updating studyisland.com with a new look and feel, other enhancements will include a new Teacher ToolKit that  gives teachers a single, easy-to-use interface from which to search for educational resources by grade, subject, subcategory and resource type and save the resources for later use in user folders. Available resources include lesson plans, teacher videos, flash animations, education videos, science simulations and project based learning activities.

A popular feature of Study Island is the ability of users to study material as a game activity. For example, when a student correctly answers a problem, he/she may bowl a virtual string or shoot a virtual basket and earn points as a reward. There are numerous games that patrons may choose from and soon users will be able to play Cup Speed Stacking and Slingshot games on their mobile devices.

Another exciting planned upgrade to Study Island is the embedding of Khan Academy math videos in Study Island lessons.

As administrator of the program at Higgins, the library has enrolled and grouped all 1,450 students by English and math classes. Recently, two new multi-grade groups (the Higgins Spelling Bee Team and the Higgins Writing Lab) were formed to use Study Island to prep for the Feb. 16 Spelling Bee and to create the Higgins Hawkeye school newspaper. The library has also purchased the Study Island Graphic Novels and Fine Arts packages.